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The Sirens Of Titan (S.F. Masterworks)
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Everything in this Book is True
Review date: 2010-01-20 Rating: 10 out of 10
Set somewhere in between WWII and the 3rd great depression, the story flitters between affairs on Earth, Mars and the Jupiter moon of Titan. The central character is a scientist called Winston Niles Rumford who has flown his spaceship into a 'Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum' turning himself and his dog into time travelling apparitions!!! As a result, Rumford is burdened with the knowledge of the fate of human kind and struggles to guide them, as best he can, to their ultimate doom.
Structurally and uncharacteristically for Vonnegut it is written in the third person. However, his presence can be felt in the narrators voice which is wonderfully sardonic and ironical. His use of grammar, the spaces in between the words and the metaphors he uses to describe mundane activities, to me, is what makes his writing so compulsive.
Unlike most of his other books (i.e. Slaughter House 5) there is a strong S.F. strand running through it. However, i'm not so sure that that was the intention. It's more of a comment on the genre of Science Fiction and how it can be used as a safe play ground for writers to explore sensitive subjects such as fascism and human subjugation, without upsetting anyone.
All in all, it's a convoluted, existentialist pun on the fruitility and pointlessness of human endeavour.
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Reviews
If you've never tried Vonnegut, this is the place to start
Review date: 2009-06-04 Rating: 10 out of 10
Winston Rumfoord visits the planets. He sees plenty, but is powerless to change anything. Although he understands the past and the future, he can affect no change. But he has a destiny and it's on the moons of Saturn where he'll discover the meaning of life and the ultimate destiny of mankind.
This is a pleasant read. Although nihilistic, the story is presented in a whimsical and ironic manner. This is a warm up for Vonnegut's later more profound works. The principles of pre-determined fate and the futility of existence are presented here but for pure comic effect rather than the cutting serious approach used later in Slaughterhouse 5. The invented religion of God the Utterly Indifferent is a great phrase but doesn't have much substance behind it and isn't as well applied as the ludicrous religion in Cat's Cradle. That is not a major concern. This is probably the author's most easily enjoyable novel with more fun asides and great lines than any novel has a right to have.
There's a serious message all right, but it's buried beneath the gags rather than presented up front as in the later books. Throwaway ideas here are developed further later on, but in many ways I think Vonnegut may have been better served staying with this whimisical but no less biting style.
Most memorable is the ending which provides the genesis of Douglas Adams's 42 as the meaning of life gag along with several other of Adams' classic ideas, except they are done a lot better here and a lot earlier. This is a very funny novel and probably the best one to start with if you want to try his books.
One of my ALL TIME FAVOURITES!
Review date: 2009-05-09 Rating: 10 out of 10
This book may not be for everyone, but it is one of my all time favourites and I think I have read it twenty or more times over the years. I read it 2 times just last years!
I can see that it may be a bit hard getting into at the beginning, but if you just persist, you will not regret it. The book flips back and forth between time and space and planets. It is not as spacey as you might think. Vonnegut was a humanist. This book is a play on politics and religion. It is satirical and funny, serious and beautiful. You feel so very much for the characters as they lead you through a long chain of events from a hermit stock broker hiding in a hotel room, using the bible as code for the market...through a phony war from Mars.. to a religion made to save the world.
I love it, love it, love it!
It deserves the title 'SF Masterwork'
Review date: 2007-08-15 Rating: 10 out of 10
For some reason it was America that held the monopoly on the SF satirical novel. Vonnegut, and later Sladek and Sheckley and indeed Dick with his more subtle comedy, produced some sublime works which turned society on its head and forced us to take a long hard look.
For Nineteen Fifty-Nine this is a remarkable novel, published at a time when SF was arguably becoming very serious about itself.
There is nothing scientific or realistic about `The Sirens of Titan'. As Dick was later to do to incredible effect, Vonnegut used the language of SF to make his own points without letting any of those annoying scientific facts get in the way of the story.
The central figure, Winston Niles Rumfoord, is a billionaire with his own private spaceship which he promptly flies into a Syno-Chronastic Infundibulum which transforms him (and his dog Kazak who happened to be with Rumfoord on the ship) into a wave of energy pulsing between our sun and Betelgeuse. The upshot of this is that Rumfoord can see the past and future simultaneously. Niles reappears on Earth every fifty-nine days and has spoken to no one but his wife and butler until the day he summons fellow billionaire Malachi Constant.
Rumfoord tells Constant that he will travel to Mars, then to Mercury, back to Earth and then to Titan, amongst other things.
Malachi of course is highly sceptical and so Vonnegut begins a tour-de-force of storytelling in which Rumfoord manipulates the entire world, while using Malachi - in some cases quite literally - as a puppet.
What only becomes clear later is that Rumfoord himself is only a tiny part in a two hundred thousand year old plan by the Tralfamadoreans to get a spare part to a stranded messenger on Titan. He is taking a secret message to a race in another part of the galaxy, the final irony being that the message is a simple dot, which translates in Tralfamadorean as `greetings!'
Vonnegut employs many SF clichés in new and surprising ways. The billionaire's private prototype spaceship for instance is straight out of an EE `Doc' Smith adventure. The flying saucers of course, by Nineteen Fifty-Nine were a familiar staple of B-movies. Salo, the Tralfamadorean who has been waiting on Titan for Two Hundred Thousand Years for his spare part, is a three-legged robot who, unaccountably, has developed more compassion and emotion than most of the human cast.
Above all, in a genre that was previously awash with novels about the superiority of Humanity, The Sirens of Titan emphasises the sheer insignificance of our world.
The only British successor of any note to Vonnegut is Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy's central premise (that the Earth was designed by mice as a giant organic computer to answer one specific question) is very similar to that of Vonnegut's. One should also note Kingsley Amis' `The Alteration' which can hold its own as a British novel in the satirical SF novel stakes against all-comers. See also Richard Cowper. These have been unjustly overshadowed by the popularity of the US authors for reasons which cannot be fathomed.
Superb, bleakly blackly funny and provocotive
Review date: 2007-08-09 Rating: 10 out of 10
This is my first read of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I can only say i found it gripping. It's imaginative, and so astoundingly modern in its tone, you could be forgiven for thinking it was written this year!
The pace never lets up. It is thought provoking and enormously (though darkly) funny. It really is a five star read. And I'm going to look in to some of his other novels too. I've been told that "Slaughter house 5" is also a fine read.
It's a weird, warped, beautifully captured universe. I'd find it hard to believe anybody wouldn't enjoy this.
Product Details/Specifications
Authors:
Kurt Vonnegut
Recording label: Gollancz
Manufacturer: Gollancz
EAN: 9781857988840
Binding: Paperback
Dewey decimal number: 813
ISBN: 1857988841
Number of pages: 224
Publication date: 1999-09-09
Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Published)